Daniela Gerson

Contact Info

Daniela is an assistant professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge with a focus on community, ethnic and participatory media and the founding editor of the immigration newsletter Migratory Notes.

Previously, Daniela worked with the Los Angeles Times as a community engagement editor and directed the Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. As part of that role, she was the editor of Alhambra Source, a multilingual community site. It is also a research initiative into how local news can foster civic engagement and cross linguistic and ethnic barriers.

Daniela has reported for the Financial Times Magazine, The New York Times, PRI’s The World, Weekend America, Der Spiegel, WNYC: New York Public Radio, among other outlets. Her first newspaper job was as an immigration reporter for the New York Sun, where her beat included Chinese-Italian tensions in Brooklyn, Irish undocumented immigrants in the Bronx, the national immigration debate in Washington and Dominican deportees in Santo Domingo.

She spent more than a year reporting from Berlin on guest worker programs as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Scholar and Arthur F. Burns Fellow. She also investigated her own family’s refugee experience in an award-winning German-language radio documentary, Too Many Geister.

Daniela graduated from Brown University with a BA in International Relations and History, and USC Annenberg with an MA in Specialized Journalism, focusing on demographics, immigration and digital media. She speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and is conversant in German and Hebrew.